Tag Archives: anansi

I haven’t done these in a long, long time, but I just found a book of Anansi stories on Amazon, and I’ll be posting a few of these a week to practice for the interviews I need to do over the next few weeks.

Those of you who grew up somewhere other than Africa might recognize this story as being the same as ‘The Tar Baby‘ which is the Uncle Remus version of the same story. Most of the Anansi stories have a matching story in Southern US folklore, although for a variety of reasons most of these have picked up racist overtones over the last 200 years. This is one of many reasons that I prefer the Anansi stories.

In the beginning, all tales and stories belonged to Nyame, the Sky God. But Kwaku Anansi, the spider, yearned to be the owner of all the stories known in the world, and he went to Nyame and offered to buy them. Here’s the story.